


Unicorn Safety Protocol

by ArabellaStrange



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Animals, Anxiety, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Family, Fluff, Gen, Love, M/M, Parentlock, married, parenting, post-series 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 17:24:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16246337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArabellaStrange/pseuds/ArabellaStrange
Summary: Sherlock comes home with a heavy step and a tear-stained Rosie. Unicorns aren't all they're cracked up to be.





	Unicorn Safety Protocol

**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely post-series 4. Not betaed. Just a wee bit of fluff.

John is mid-sentence on his chapter when the front door  _thunks_  shut.

‘Good,’ he thinks to himself, glancing up at the clock on the wall, ‘they’re h—‘

But then he catches a hint of Rosie’s sniffly hiccoughs and Sherlock’s slightly heavier than usual tread, and gets to his feet to meet them at the door.

Sherlock immediately hands her over.

‘What—?’ he begins to ask, but Rosie is shifting restlessly in his arms, planting her face in his neck.

‘Dada,’ she whimpers, and John is astounded—taken aback—to have his daughter brought home by the only other person who loves her as much as he does, in tears.

‘Hey, love,’ he shushes, bouncing her just a little and using his free hand to keep the sudden influx of baby-blonde curls out of his mouth. Sherlock has wandered into the front room and hangs his coat, hiding his face and eyes from John. ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? Yeah, I’m here, I know.’

He doesn’t know, of course—can’t fathom what spoiled the outing both of his beloved, ridiculous creatures were so looking forward to. Rosie even smells a bit like hay and popcorn and a messy good time. Sherlock could no doubt deduce whatever happened if their places were reversed, but instead he’s wordlessly moving towards the bedroom.

‘Hey,’ John calls, a little sharply, because what in god’s name happened.

Sherlock pauses, hand on the bathroom door. ‘Ask her about her arm.’

‘Why don’t you—oh, sodding hell,’ he mutters, as Sherlock disappears into the bathroom and answers only, a second later, with the sound of the taps springing into gear.

Rosie is breathing heavily against him, not fidgeting anymore, and she’s still young enough and prone to impromptu midnight play sessions that he reckons she may as well go for a nap. And... John can check her arms as he puts her down.

‘Did you have a nice time at the petting zoo, love bug?’ he asks as he climbs.  _Maybe she got a bee sting_ , he wonders,  _and Sherlock's disappointed about not being able to keep them like he’s been wanting to do_. Except Sherlock’s mood hadn’t radiated disappointment—his closed-off eyes and small, downturned mouth, even his tired shoulders and leaden step, pointed away from that scenario.

‘Cows,’ Rosie mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I want to see da cows, Dada.’

‘Were the cows nice, then? Make some friends?’ he replies brightly. They’re in his old room—her room now, gone a bit pink and a lot untidy—and he sets her down on the edge of her bed. She sways where he sits her.

 _God, I’m getting old_ , he moans inwardly. His knees creak as he kneels to untie her laces and begin getting her down to suitable naptime layers.

‘Cows were scawy,’ she informs him, voice quivering, and at this he looks up at her. She’s pouting, a remaining sniffle trembling on her small nose. ‘Da cows are too big. Big and they don’t like being petted. I thinked they were my friends because of their pwetty horns. But Papa yewwed at me. I want to see dem anyway because of they were soft and fluffy and they looked like unicorns but with two—dey were orange, Dada! But I’m not stupposed to pet dem even though I weeeeeeally want to. Can we see some orange cows tomorrow, Dada?’

Through the welter of three-year-old stream of consciousness, John’s managing to put it all together.

‘Maybe, bug,’ he hedges, knowing he won’t remember. ‘Did Papa get upset?’

‘Yes,’ she admits, bright blue eyes frank and open and suddenly—briefly, he knows—clouded with the faint memory of past unhappiness. ‘He yewwed at me and he hurt my arm!’ She thrusts it out towards him for inspection.

‘Let me see that,’ he frowns. Putting to one side her blue Paddington coat and rolling up the sleeve of her knit jumper, he examines the proffered section of forearm. It looks much as it ever does: tiny, still downy-skinned, but unblemished. ‘Hmm. Looks fine to me.’

‘I knowed it,’ she reasons, arm dropping again and seeming immediately unfazed by the experience. ‘I made it better with my mind.’

‘Very impressive,’ John smirks. Evidently Sherlock’s occasional protestations of being able to cure his various scrapes and bruises have distilled in Rosie’s head into a belief in magical self-healing. ‘How about we take this jumper off so you can get comfy with Peppa Pig? Did you see any real pigs?’

As he lifts the outer layers off and gets her down to a striped, stained top that she _insists_ on keeping even though he worries it makes him the scandal of her play centre, _going out in messy clothes like that!_ , and her mud-caked leggings, and of course her stuffed Peppa, she babbles about pigs and goats and unicorns and tigers, and at some point as John is momentarily out of the room to get her a glass of water, she falls asleep. He sets the cup on the end table near her head, then carefully pulls aside the short caps of her sleeves and double-checks, but it’s as he thought. Nothing.

Also as expected, Sherlock is nowhere to be seen in either the front room or kitchen or, as John walks by, bathroom. 

Sherlock is instead curled up on his side in the semi-dark bedroom, on John’s side, away from the door. 

John sighs.

‘She told you.’

‘I think I got most of it,’ John agrees, though he knows there must be more for Sherlock to be so retreated into himself at something as silly as a misunderstanding with a notoriously intractable pre-schooler. He knows, of course, that whatever happened, Sherlock is beating himself up about it—and, judging by Rosie’s demeanour, that ‘it’ was nothing more than bit of nervous parenting on Sherlock’s behalf. The ‘anxious father’ look was one that had come gradually upon Sherlock, more or less just as John was beginning to shed the fragile shell he’d built around them and allow Rosie to do things like sit alone for more than a second when he needed the loo, stick her fingers in her mouth without being disinfected first, go more than two days without being inspected for rashes, bumps, and other alarming signs of imminent disaster. 

He toes off his shoes and slides into bed behind Sherlock, wrapping his arms around him and nosing up to the nape of his neck.

As he was hoping, Sherlock exhales what seems like a long-withheld breath.

After a minute or so of quiet ambient noise, syncing their respiration, Sherlock squirms ever so slightly. 

‘I shouted at her.’

‘Mm.’

John makes certain not to move away or lessen his grip, even though he could probably breathe a little better if he slid back a centimetre or two.

‘I...’ Sherlock's voice seems stuck around his tongue, reverberating through his ribcage. ‘I—she disobeyed me, because she knows that I am terrible with discipline, and she wanted to stroke the stupid cow, and she’s  _three_  so her impulse control is dodgy at best, and she—’

‘Sherlock, she’s fine.’

‘But this enormous bovine _idiot_ turned its ridiculous head towards her, and then it started to jog over just as she started to run towards it, and I suddenly pictured...’ He goes quiet.

John’s own heart is in his throat, because as stupid and helicopterish as it makes him, he hates it when anything bigger than a dachshund even crosses the street near them some days. She’s still small enough that everything lights up his danger instincts if he’s in that sort of mood, and worst of all she’s clever enough lately to have worked out how to get herself into trouble but—for reasons both developmentally and parental—she hasn’t quite learned the best self-protective reflexes.

So he threads his fingers into Sherlock’s and nods against his skin.

‘I get it. I do. She told me it was pretty. And you pulled her out of the way and you told her off, which honestly Sherlock? That’s what you should do. Kids are a constant danger to themselves, that’s our job.’

The loud, wordless swallow of Sherlock’s throat echoes in John’s closer ear. 

‘It struck me so forcibly, in that second, that it was—this beast just—just didn’t  _know_.’

‘Know to be careful? No, maybe not, though you’d think at a kids’ petting zoo they’d maybe bring something a little less pointy than a bloody Highland cow—’

‘That she is  _important_.’

For a moment he loses his words. Again, for a sharp and staggering flash, his mind seizes with the call Sherlock would have had to make— _John, she’s... they’re taking her to hospital, she’s been gouged_ , or maybe kicked or stomped or all three, _she wasn’t moving, you need to come quick, it happened so fast—_ , of all the damned work he’s put in to raising this little human and getting her to eat greens and sleep through the night and not talk too much about blood and dead people around the families they meet in the park. (His given up trying to get Sherlock to learn all three.) But the thought is really more than he can wrap his head around, and he emphatically doesn’t want to. He sets it aside as best he can.

Instead, he tucks his knees in more tightly and nudges once more with his nose. He doesn’t release his intaken breath until Sherlock squeezes his hand.

‘I love you.’

‘For what? For traumatising your daughter and potentially dislocating her shoulder?’

‘Because you are a wreck right now, but Rosie is fine, and she’s fine because your first thought was as her father. She’s your daughter, too. And she loves you, in case you’re getting that at all mixed up in your big head. She’s mostly just wondering how soon she can throw herself at some large livestock when the closest we’ve got here is, well… I dunno—’

‘Angelo’s osso bucco.’

John snorts, and feels a little shake of laughter ripple through Sherlock. ‘Maybe let’s not tell her that’s what that means just yet.’

‘Advanced intellectual stimulation is essential to a child’s cognitive development, John, as we have discussed numerous times.’

‘Yeah, yeah, teach her all the Latin you want, just don’t let’s start making it any more difficult than necessary to feed her. We’ll deal with her potential stubborn veganism once she’s old enough not to spit out vitamins.’

‘Hmm,’ is all Sherlock rumblingly retorts, so John expects Rosie will be refusing to eat her fish fingers by next week.

But then Sherlock flips over, rolling to face John, and his mouth is a little less downturned, his eyes a little less defeated. John slides a hand to tug slightly at Sherlock’s mossy green shirtfront, his other arm going beneath Sherlock’s neck for him to rest on.

‘Could’ve been worse,’ he suggests.

‘Exactly,’ Sherlock grimaces.

‘Who’d’ve thought you’d be the over-protective one.’ He smiles when he says it, because it’s true but he also hopes Sherlock knows they’re in this together—as upside down and dizzy in this mad endeavour as each other.

‘Do you think she’ll...’

John waits, because he knows—from both sides of this kind of conversation—that he should. 

‘Will she be afraid of me now?’

John hopes his face doesn’t look as heartbroken as he feels just in that second. ‘Not possible,’ he whispers. And he kisses him, quietly but with as much calm and certainty as he can muster. Rosie is enamoured of Sherlock, gazes in awe at him when he does experiment or goes on a whirling rant—sometimes literally twirling about with her in his arms—about just about anything; tells him every single thing she sees as they walk or take the Tube or stroll through the shops, and giggles delightedly when he deduces embarrassing things she only half understands about the people around them. Only John has ever been so devoted an audience, and in return only Sherlock has the stamina for some of Rosie’s less coherent, abrupt-ending narratives.

They kiss for another moment, until Sherlock tucks his arms in between them and nestles closer into his pillow, eyes shutting. 

Eventually, he murmurs, ‘I blame the Scots.’

John laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> Highland cows (or really coos) are brilliant. I would absolutely pet this one (she's called Morven) if I could: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BoWCkKeno8_/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BoWCkKeno8_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)


End file.
